The Mirror

In town it was very urban but in the country cows were covering the hills. The clouds were near and very moist. I was walking along the pavement with Anna, enjoying the scattered scenery. Suddenly a sound like a deep bell came from behind us. We both turned to look. "It's the words you spoke in the past, coming back to haunt you," Anna explained. "They always do, you know."       Indeed I did. Many times this deep bell-like tone had intruded itself on my thoughts, scrambling them at first, the rearranging them in apple-pie order. "Two crows," the voice seemed to say, "were sitting on a sundial in the God-given sunlight. Then one flew away."       "Yes . . . and then ?" I wanted to ask, but I kept silent. We turned into a courtyard and walked up serval flights of stairs to the roof, where a party was in progress. "This is my friend Hans," Anna said by way of introduc- tion. No one paid much attention and severa

In sealed box cars travel names across the land, and how far they will travel so, and will they ever get out, don't ask, I won't say, I don't know. The name Nathan strikes fist against wall, the name Isaac, demented, signs, the name Sarah calls out for water for the name Aaron that's dying of thrist. Don't jump while it's moving, name David. You're a name that dooms to defeat, given to no one, and homeless, too heavy to bear in this land. Let your son have a Slavic name, for here they count hairs on the head, for here they tell good from evil by names and by eyelids' shape. Don't jump while it's moving. Your son will be Lech. Don't jump while it's moving. Not time yet. Don't jump. The night echoes like laughter mocking clatter of wheels upon tracks. A cloud made of people moved over the land, a big cloud gives a small rain, one tear, a small rain—one tear, a dry season. Tracks lead off into black forest.

Remember that night, after the card game We went bumping down the road drunk insulting each other. You said things so vicious the next day you apologized. But I could not recall a one of them. I was robbed. Yours for that most momentous of words: "Vindication"— it is the labyrinthine word. All hail to Mighty Æschylus. Beat the devil, beat the devil, beat the devil, Beat the devil, beat the devil, beat the... (Hear the train Drive steadily on Towards nowhere) [From: Burke, K. (1968) Collected poems, 1915-1967 . Berkeley: University of Caliornia Press. p30]

I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you, majestic Shade, You whom I read so well so many years ago, did I read your lesson right? did I see through your phases to the real? your heaven, your hell did I enquire properly into? For years then I forgot you, I put you down, ingratitude is the necessary curse of making things new: I brought my family to see me through, I brought my homage & my soft remorse, I brought a book or two only, including in the end your last strange poems made under the shadow of death Your high figures float again across my mind and all your past fills my walled garden with your honey breath wherein I move, a mote. [From: Berryman, J. (1972) Selected Poems, 1983-1968 . London: Faber and Faber Ltd, p143.]

About resititution, say this, the money is nice. Buys schöne Aussicht, Schlagrahm, Rosenthal and Rucksack (my bitter, modest Wermut) O lovely handy twenty years later. Neither mangled, crippled nor marks, nor bruises on it. Honest cash money healthy as when last seen, separated, kissed goodbye— (Besides, I was hardly born, no more than Horst Eichmann; it was my father's business) Why where have you been my darling and how long I thought you one with dentures, gold teeth, babies' bones, the glue pots of the world had had you— (And why should they get fat on it? They're getting more than enough) Let's know ourselves my treasure. Come Bundesbahn together.                       Ashes Ashes                       fall down, all, fall down [From: Halley, Anne. (1966) Between wars, and other poems . London: Oxford University Press.]

Martha this is a catalog of days passing before you looked again. Someday you will browse and order them at will, or in your necessities. I have taken a house at the Jersey shore this summer. It is not my house. Today the lightning bugs came. On the first day you were dead. With each breath the skin of your face moved falling in like crumpled muslin. We scraped together the smashed image of flesh preparing a memory. No words. No words. On the eighth day you startled the doctors speaking from your deathplace to reassure us that you were trying. Martha these are replacement days should you ever need them given for those you once demanded and never found. May this trip be rewarding; no one can fault you again Martha for answering necessity too well and the gods who honor hard work will keep this second coming free from that lack of choice which hindered your first journey to this Tarot house. They said no hope no dreaming accept this case of flesh as evi

Deaths & betrayals, a friend having her breasts cut off, a friend having his heart re-wired, a husband lying, a lover never writing, & all this in the middle of May. I walk out in the green wind of Spring. The air whistles at my calves like silk stockings— my grandmother's silk stockings kept in a drawer— & whispering songs of the twenties. My breasts ache, my heart skips over cracks, my womb pulls earthward with its heavy blood. I seem to be attached to those I love by chains of flesh. Perhaps the mind lacks empathy enough; the body has to bleed as well.                         ☙ I can't imagine them cutting you apart— I with my endless dreams of torture, who lay awake nights with my eyelids screaming all childhood long. I never saw your breasts yet I can't imagine you without them. All week I have been fondling my nipples, half in terror, half in pleasure. Stay, flesh, stay. If it is all we have, especially, stay.       

Swan filets and straw wine, an emphatic look to the driveway whose golf clubs are scattered feelingly. You can undress and sit down on the corduroy doormat blowing and when the Weird Sisters come calling pretend to be talking to yourself. Trouble is they don't come calling, suffering as they do from terminal agoraphobia. A frog juts from a pinecone. My goodness was that you back there? You sure know how to give a feller a good scare. I'd thought it was just bats dripping tar on the heads of the guests and the footmen. You see so little live action in this town and then everybody wants to cooperate or celebrate, sort of. I can do that too. Always. Have a good time. Something might come out in group therapy: your velvet soul as I just realized it. Please come back. I liked you so much. Thistles, dandelions, what do we care? [Ashbery, J. (2000) Your Name Here . Manchester: Carcanet. p]

Lily Bloom, what ominous fallen crowfeathers of shadow the nightlight scattered around your outspread hair on feverish cumulus of pillows— demonic darkness, hair, feathers, jabs of greenish sickroom light.                         And your sallow face, long, lost, lonely, O Lily Bloom, dying,                         looked into mine those nights, searching, equine, for life to be lived— but not believing, Believing yourself fit for the knacker's yard... What I told you—promised you— though I meant it, didn't make sense: Friendship, Life of Art, Love of Nature. You had no correlatives, I had no holiness. You saved me the exact shame of not coming across. But Lily— whom I remember not in my head (or barely once a year) but in my nerves—what brimming measure of living your death exacts from me! And when the fire of me smokes or gasps as flames will do when a contending element chokes their utterance, and they burn livid instead of red, then I know I am cheati

Someday if someday comes we will agree that trust is not about safety that keeping faith is not about deciding to clip our fingernails exactly to the same length or wearing a uniform that boasts our unanimity Someday if someday comes we'll know the difference between liberal laissez-faire pluralism and the way you cut your hair and the way I clench my hand against my cheekbone both being possible gestures of defiance Someday if there's a someday we will bring food, you'll say I can't eat what you've brought I'll say Have some in the name of our trying to be friends, you'll say What about you? We'll taste strange meat and we'll admit we've tasted stranger Someday if someday ever comes we'll go back and reread those poems and manifestos that so enraged us in each other's hand I'll say,  But damn,  you wrote it so I couldn't write it off     You'll say I read you always, even when I hated you [F

Once more you've degraded yourself on the road. The freeway turned you back in on yourself and you found nothing, not even a good false name. The waitress mocked you and you paid your bill sweating in her glare. You tried to tell her how many lovers you've had. Only a croak came out. Your hand shook when she put hot coins in it. Your face was hot and you ran face down to the car. Miles you hated her. Then you remembered what the doctor said: really a hatred of self. Where in flashes of past, the gravestone you looked for years and never found, was there a dignified time? Only when alone, those solitary times with sky gray as a freeway And now you are alone. The waitress will never see you again. You often pretend you don't remember people you do. You joke back spasms of shame from a night long ago. Splintered glass. Bewildering blue swirl of police. Light in your eyes. Hard questions. Your car is cruising. You cross with ease at 80 the state line and

' the void eternally generative ' the Wen Fu of Lu Chi 1 Tell the beads of the chromosomes like a rosary, Love in the genes, if it fails We will produce no sane man again I have seen too many young people become adults, young            friends become old people, all that is not ours, The sources And the crude bone                      —we say Took place Like the mass of the hills. 'The sun is a molten mass'. Therefore Fall into oneself—? Reality, blind eye Which has taught us to stare— Your elbow on a car-edge Incognito as summer, I wrote. Not you but a girl At least  Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful             thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity  2 Troubled that you are not, as they say, Working— I think we try rather to understand, We try also to remain together 

The deaths about you when you stir in sleep hasten me toward you. Out of the bitter mouth that sours the dark, I sigh for what we are who heave our vines of blood against the air. Old men have touched their dreaming to their hearts: that is their age. I touch the moment's dream and shrink like them into the thing we are who drag our sleeps behind us like fear. Murderers have prayed their victims to escape, then killed because they have stayed. In murdering time I think of rescues from the thing we are who cannot slip one midnight from the year. Scholars have sunk their eyes in penitence for sins themselves invented. Sick as Faust I trade with devils, damning what we are who walk our dreams out on a leaning tower. Saints on their swollen knees have banged at death: it opened; they fell still. I bang at life to knock the walls away from what we are who raise our deaths about us when we stir. Lovers unfevering sonnets from their blood have burned with patienc